"At the pinnacle of San Cha's opera Inebria me, an apparition in white emerged: Esperanza (Kyle Kidd), angelic and blood-smeared, clutching a red rose. Dolores (San Cha, the show's librettist and composer) gazed at the spirit, her expression a blend of awe and longing, the unraveling newlywed finally alight with something beyond grief. Her encounter with Esperanza sparked a radical, gender-free religious fervor, one of ecstasy and drama, detached from self-flagellation or duty."
"Inebria me took Winningstad Theatre to church on September 5 and 6-the three-act opera was one of the Time-Based Art Festival's most striking works in years. San Cha, a Mexican American artist whose stage name blends the Spanish words san (saint) and sancha (mistress), adapted her 2019 album La Luz de Esperanza into a Spanish-language opera that queers the telenovela genre's heteronormativity."
"Set in a "haunted hacienda," Inebria me's stage was shrouded in fog and dominated by a black, angled cross. On either side, chiptune pioneer Leeni Ramadan played warped synth while Darian Donovan Thomas bowed a violin, both dressed in nuns' habits. The opera opened with Rosa (Carolina Oliveros) praying to the veiled Madre Jutta (Lu Coy), who loomed from a second-level balcony. Kneeling in guilt, she confessed envy for her sister Dolores, whose impending wedding provoked some seriously dark emotions in Rosa and her other sister, Azalea (stefa marin alarcon)."
Inebria me is a three-act Spanish-language opera that queers telenovela heteronormativity and adapts the 2019 album La Luz de Esperanza. A working-class femme named Dolores marries a wealthy man and feels confined until the apparition Esperanza awakens her queerness and spiritual agency. The production is led by a trans and queer cast and crew of color and draws from strict Catholic upbringing, queer self-discovery, and Bay Area drag influences. Staging in a fog-shrouded haunted hacienda with a black angled cross, warped synth, bowed violin, and nuns' habits blends melodrama with a gender-free, ecstatic religious fervor.
Read at Portland Mercury
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